Unity brethren, lend me your ear... eyes.
Spine is awesome. Unity is awesome. Thanks to Mitch, the two go together better every couple days now. (Thanks Mitch!) However, there's one technical problem that people have been coming back to on the boards for well over a year now, and to the best of my search abilities I haven't been able to find a flawless solution. Unity has a nice lighting engine, but currently out of the box we're limited to Spine animations that cast but don't receive shadows and simplistic vertex lighting, which is just not nearly as cool as per pixel lighting. All the per pixel lighting shaders for spine/unity that I've found on the forums use alpha cutouts, which might look good on a black background but look pretty fugly when you put them in a game.
So, my suggestion is that anyone interested in this stuff
and I know you're out there, gleefully animating away at your monitors every day just like me
let's pool what we know and get Spine lighting in Unity right once and for all.
What I think would be great, which I have yet to find:
1.) A simple shader similar to what we already have that correctly receives shadows in addition to casting them. And it should work when you flipX and flipY on the sprite as well. This seems like it might be especially nice to have in Unity 5, with realtime lighting getting a big upgrade.
2.) A shader with point lighting that correctly alpha blends the sprite. No ugly pixelated edges on the sprite, we want the best of both worlds here.
3.) Assuming we can get point lighting working, then we can incorporate normal mapping into that shader and punctuate the darkness with our tasteful highlights & maniacal laughter.
If there's anything not on this list that people are looking for, feel free to post here. There are enough of us Unitites at this point that we should be able to shackle this shaderbeast.
Who's with me?
By the way, I've gotten a (hopefully) good start on the shadow receiving in this thread: http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3292 I'm going to take some time tomorrow to try to finish the job, and maybe learn some more about writing shaders in Unity and whatnot. I'll update this thread with the results.